[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":218},["ShallowReactive",2],{"codex-\u002Fcodex\u002Fbetter-than-you-think":3,"codex-around-\u002Fcodex\u002Fbetter-than-you-think":207},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"cover":175,"date":176,"description":177,"draft":178,"extension":179,"faq":180,"kind":190,"meta":191,"navigation":192,"noindex":178,"ogImage":175,"path":193,"readingMinutes":194,"seo":195,"seoDescription":196,"seoTitle":197,"standfirst":198,"stem":199,"tags":200,"updated":175,"__hash__":206},"codex\u002Fcodex\u002Fbetter-than-you-think.md","Better Than You Think",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":166},"minimark",[9,13,16,22,29,32,37,44,50,61,71,77,84,88,91,94,97,106,110,113,116,119,127,135,139,142,145,148,151,158,161],[10,11,12],"p",{},"James Blake put a note on his Instagram story in June — reposted by Pigeons &\nPlanes, which is where most people saw it. It is a list, and each line takes away\none thing an artist might have used to work out whether anything is going well.",[10,14,15],{},"Reviews, because the music press stopped making money. Comment sections, because\nthey fill with fake fan accounts manufacturing a bandwagon. YouTube counts,\nbecause they get bought. Streaming numbers, because of bot farms driving\ndiscovery. And then the one that would have sounded absurd five years ago: you\ncannot even be sure a song was made by human beings.",[17,18,19],"blockquote",{},[10,20,21],{},"If you're an artist, remember that in 2026 there's not a single part of the\nsystem that isn't faked. You're probably doing better than you think.",[23,24],"embedded-player",{"height":25,"provider":26,"src":27,"title":28},700,"Instagram","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.instagram.com\u002Fp\u002FDZ5IyWtlsBb\u002Fembed","James Blake's Instagram story on faked music industry metrics, via Pigeons & Planes",[10,30,31],{},"A post like this travels because it feels true. That is exactly the reason to go\nthrough it slowly rather than nod at it, so I have taken the five claims one at a\ntime.",[33,34,36],"h2",{"id":35},"going-down-the-list","Going down the list",[10,38,39,43],{},[40,41,42],"strong",{},"Streaming numbers."," This one is not a suspicion, it is documented. In\nSeptember 2024 the US Department of Justice brought its first criminal case for\nAI-driven streaming fraud, against a North Carolina musician who uploaded\nhundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks and streamed them with roughly ten\nthousand bot accounts; he pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit more than eight\nmillion dollars. Deezer, which now publishes numbers on this, put overall\nstreaming fraud at eight per cent of all streams in 2025. Blake is right, and\nthe scale is not marginal.",[10,45,46,49],{},[40,47,48],{},"Whether a human made it."," Also documented, and moving fast. Deezer reported\nin January 2026 that AI-generated tracks made up around 39 per cent of daily\nuploads. By April it was 44 per cent, at nearly 75,000 tracks a day. By July it\nhad passed half. On the fraud side, the company found that up to 85 per cent of\nstreams on those AI tracks were themselves fraudulent, and demonetised them.\nSpotify removed more than 75 million spam tracks in the year to September 2025.\nThe catalogue genuinely is full of things nobody made.",[10,51,52,55,56,60],{},[40,53,54],{},"Bought YouTube numbers and bot farms."," Artificial streaming as a paid service\nis real and easy to buy. The part of Blake's phrasing I would not repeat as\nestablished is ",[57,58,59],"em",{},"labels pay for bot farms"," — the prosecuted cases so far involve\nindependent operators and third-party promotion services rather than majors, and\nI have not seen a proven case against a major label. What is fair to say is that\nthe platforms clearly consider label-delivered content part of the problem:\nsince April 2024 Spotify has charged labels and distributors a per-track penalty\nwhere flagrant artificial streaming is found on music they delivered. You do not\nbuild that mechanism for a problem confined to strangers.",[10,62,63,66,67,70],{},[40,64,65],{},"Reviews."," The weakest line as written, and the strongest underneath. Blogs\nand magazines really did lose their business model, freelance rates really have\ncollapsed, and the money that remains around music writing really does come\ndisproportionately from labels, PR and brands — sponsored features, paid\nplacements, publications owned by companies with acts to sell. That is a\nstructural conflict worth naming. ",[57,68,69],{},"Journalists now get paid off by labels"," is a\ndifferent and much heavier accusation, aimed at people mostly earning very\nlittle, and Blake offers no case. I would keep the structure and drop the word.",[10,72,73,76],{},[40,74,75],{},"Comment sections."," Trivially manipulable, obviously gamed, and the least\nimportant of the five, because nobody sensible was using them as evidence\nanyway.",[78,79,81],"codex-note",{"kicker":80},"On checking things you agree with",[10,82,83],{},"Four of the five hold up, one is overstated. That is a good result for a viral\npost — and worth establishing before repeating it, since the alternative is\nrunning on the same trust-nothing feeling the post is describing.",[33,85,87],{"id":86},"they-all-break-in-the-same-place","They all break in the same place",[10,89,90],{},"What every item on that list has in common is that none of them is the thing\nanyone actually wants to know.",[10,92,93],{},"The real question — did this reach somebody, did it matter to them — is\nexpensive to measure and always has been. So the industry substituted proxies:\ncounts, plays, reviews, comments. Cheap to collect, easy to compare, and close\nenough to the truth to be useful for a while.",[10,95,96],{},"Then the proxies started allocating money. Playlist positions, booking fees,\nadvances and algorithmic reach all began to key off the same handful of numbers,\nand at that moment faking them stopped being vanity and became a business with a\npositive return. Fraud is not an aberration in that arrangement. It is the\npredictable end state of any measure that decides who gets paid, which is why\neach of Blake's five collapsed in the same way and at roughly the same time.",[10,98,99,100,105],{},"Which is the same argument as\n",[101,102,104],"a",{"href":103},"\u002Fcodex\u002Fa-number-without-a-denominator","a number without a denominator",", one step\nfurther along. There the problem was reading a metric without context. Here the\nmetric has stopped describing anything at all.",[33,107,109],{"id":108},"what-survives","What survives",[10,111,112],{},"The useful move is not to stop measuring. It is to notice which signals are\nexpensive to fake, and those tend to be the ones involving a specific person\ndoing something that costs them.",[10,114,115],{},"Somebody buys the record. Somebody buys a ticket and stands in the room until the\nend rather than leaving after the first drink. A promoter books you a second\ntime, having watched what happened the first time. Somebody sends a message about\none track. Somebody comes back a year later.",[10,117,118],{},"None of that scales, none of it looks impressive written down, and all of it is\nabsurdly uneconomic to fake — the cost of manufacturing one real person in a room\nis enormous compared to the cost of manufacturing a hundred thousand plays. The\nsmallness is the feature. Those numbers are small because they are load-bearing.",[10,120,121,122,126],{},"This is also the practical reason the releases here sit on\n",[101,123,125],{"href":124},"\u002Fcodex\u002Fthe-equity-nobody-shared","Bandcamp and Subvert rather than Spotify",": a\npurchase is a decision by a person with a name, and it survives contact with a\nsystem where plays no longer mean anything.",[128,129],"codex-cta",{"body":130,"kicker":131,"label":132,"title":133,"href":134},"Five tracks between Andalusia, Ibiza and Berlin. On Bandcamp and Subvert, where a sale is one person deciding something rather than a number going up.","The work","Buy on Bandcamp","Between Coasts EP","https:\u002F\u002Fhybridflight.bandcamp.com\u002Falbum\u002Fbetween-coasts-ep",[33,136,138],{"id":137},"the-last-line-is-the-whole-point","The last line is the whole point",[10,140,141],{},"Blake could have stopped after the diagnosis, and the post would have travelled\njust as far. He ended somewhere more useful instead: you are probably doing\nbetter than you think.",[10,143,144],{},"That sentence does a specific job. If the visible numbers around you are inflated\nand yours are not, then every comparison you make is between your real figure and\nsomebody's fiction, and you will lose that comparison permanently. Not because\nthe work is worse — because you are the only one in the room reporting honestly.",[10,146,147],{},"There is a wrong conclusion available here, and it is worth naming because it is\nthe comfortable one: if it is all fake, nothing counts, so nothing matters. That\ngets you out of doing the work. The better reading is narrower. The public\nscoreboard has stopped being information. The room has not, the record sales have\nnot, the person who came back has not.",[10,149,150],{},"Count those instead, and the picture is usually less bleak than the feed suggests.",[128,152],{"body":153,"kicker":154,"label":155,"title":156,"action":157},"Dates, releases and new entries by email. A list of actual people who asked — the smallest honest number we have, and the one we pay attention to.","No algorithm","Join the newsletter","The Radar","newsletter",[159,160],"hr",{},[10,162,163],{},[57,164,165],{},"Source: James Blake, Instagram story, June 2026, as carried by Pigeons & Planes\non 22 June 2026. Streaming fraud and AI upload figures from Deezer's newsroom\n(January, April and July 2026), Spotify's September 2025 announcement on AI and\nspam policies, and reporting on the US Department of Justice case against Michael\nSmith. Quotations are from Blake's story as posted.",{"title":167,"searchDepth":168,"depth":168,"links":169},"",3,[170,172,173,174],{"id":35,"depth":171,"text":36},2,{"id":86,"depth":171,"text":87},{"id":108,"depth":171,"text":109},{"id":137,"depth":171,"text":138},null,"2026-09-02T17:00:00","James Blake listed the parts of the music industry that can no longer be trusted and ended with a line for artists. Going through his list one claim at a time — which of them hold up, and what is left to measure when the signals are gone.",false,"md",[181,184,187],{"question":182,"answer":183},"What did James Blake say about the music industry in 2026?","In an Instagram story he listed signals he considers untrustworthy — reviews, comment sections, YouTube counts, streaming numbers, and even whether a song was made by a human — and concluded that no part of the system is unfaked, telling artists they are probably doing better than they think.",{"question":185,"answer":186},"How much streaming fraud is there actually?","Enough to be structural rather than anecdotal. Deezer reported in January 2026 that up to 85 per cent of streams on AI-generated tracks were fraudulent and demonetised them, and put overall catalogue fraud at 8 per cent of streams in 2025. Spotify removed more than 75 million spam tracks in the year to September 2025, and since April 2024 has charged labels and distributors per track where flagrant artificial streaming is found on their content.",{"question":188,"answer":189},"What can an artist measure that cannot be faked?","Things that cost a real person something: a ticket bought, a record bought, a room that stays full to the end, a promoter who rebooks, someone who comes back a second time. The numbers are small and the effort to fake them is higher than the benefit, which is exactly what makes them informative.","Response",{},true,"\u002Fcodex\u002Fbetter-than-you-think",6,{"title":5,"description":177},"Checking James Blake's list of untrustworthy music industry signals against the evidence: streaming fraud, bought numbers, AI uploads and paid coverage — and what is left worth counting.","James Blake on faked music industry metrics — what actually holds up","\"If you're an artist, remember that in 2026 there's not a single part of the system that isn't faked. You're probably doing better than you think.\"","codex\u002Fbetter-than-you-think",[201,202,203,204,205],"music industry","spotify","ai","social media","attention economy","7jEneWhrsXgcrwekyc1WmjvX7KSNeolXtn_raJChjuM",[208,213],{"title":209,"path":210,"stem":211,"description":212,"kind":190,"children":-1},"Anyone Can Mix","\u002Fcodex\u002Fanyone-can-mix","codex\u002Fanyone-can-mix","Dixon told RA that a DJ set is not rocket science — the storytelling is the part not everyone can do. On selection, order, and the moments a room takes home.",{"title":214,"path":215,"stem":216,"description":217,"kind":190,"children":-1},"Death of the Ego","\u002Fcodex\u002Fdeath-of-the-ego","codex\u002Fdeath-of-the-ego","ZAINAB argues that DJ culture needs an ego death — that the job was always a service position and has been converted into a starring one. On what that costs a dance floor, and where the screens fit in.",1789031393674]